Reclaiming Cinderella
A feminist’s journey back to beauty
You know how this story has to start, don’t you?
Once upon a time, I found myself sitting at the computer admiring a pair of the girliest, most ridiculous pair of high heels I’d ever seen.
My 12-year-old daughter, Celeste, needed some new dress shoes, so we had gone looking together online and these were the shoes that popped up in our search.
Close your eyes and picture these heels: hot pink roses, more golden glitter than kindergarten Valentine, and a giant magenta grosgrain ribbon. You should have seen my daughter. It was like her fairy godmother had made her dream shoes appear before her.
Her eyes grew bigger. Her breath caught in her chest. And then, she let out a sigh.
They didn’t come in her size.
“But you can get them, Mom,” she joked. And I did have to admit they were pretty glitterific. But I laughed, picturing myself wearing those high heels to, what, the grocery store?
So to give you a little context, for my entire adult life, feminism has been at the center. Stereotypes and all. Women’s studies classes at Berkeley. Kept my last name. Women’s March. Subscription to Ms.
Once, I even fangirled Gloria Steinem on a New York street.
So you can probably imagine how I feel about the messages our culture sends to girls about beauty. You know: impossible ideals, the weight loss industry, Photoshop, Barbie, Cinderella. Don’t even get me started on Disney movies.
When my kids were little, I’d let them watch them but made sure they knew Cinderella could darn well save herself. And The Little Mermaid? Don’t ever trade in your mermaid tail for legs, just to be with a man.
Of course, the Universe does love a good laugh. My youngest daughter, Celeste, came out of my womb a sparkle-loving, pink-adoring, ballet-dancing princess.
She knows how amazing it feels to play dress-up.
One day, Celeste came crying to me because she was too embarrassed to admit that what she really wanted for her birthday more than anything else was . . . a Barbie.
I was so conflicted.
Had I failed in her Little Feminist Training?
Or on the other hand, had I shamed that deep desire for beauty she came with into this world?
I supposed it might not be that bad to let her play with Barbie.
As long as she understood that if Barbie were life-size, her waist would be too small to hold all her vital organs.
Over the last six years, I’ve been doing the hard work of healing from emotional abuse and betrayal trauma. Yucky, disturbing stuff, really. And I have to say, I’m doing pretty great. So great, in fact, that I’ve started to turn my experience into a whole framework of healing, based on the concept of the Heroine’s Journey.
The Heroine’s Journey maps all the stages between betrayal through reconnection and finally integration. And I’m now working on putting it out in the world to help other women transcend trauma.
So I thought I had already been through my Heroine’s Journey. But something happened recently that made me realize I wasn’t quite done yet. I joined a women’s circle called Beauty + Body Reclamation.
We celebrate each other. We have a safe space to brag. We dance. We speak what we’re afraid to speak elsewhere. We flaunt red lipstick. We read books with the word “Pussy” in the title.
And what’s happening in that life-affirming space is that I found I am being called to express myself in ways that I’ve not only been rejecting for my daughter, Celeste. But for myself, too.
I’m being called to beauty, pleasure, sexuality, and the expression of my Divine Feminine.
It’s the stage of the Heroine’s Journey I call Reconnection, and it’s all about tapping into the wisdom we’ve been socialized to dismiss — intuition, emotion, turn on, pleasure, and embodied being in the world.
I’m having such a revelation, that it’s got me rethinking a lot of things that have defined me.
It even got me thinking about the Cinderella story through a whole new feminist lens.
What if Cinderella is really a Heroine’s Journey that’s been right in front of me all along?
I mean, what if the fairytale was really about a woman who had been trying so hard to take the high road — to work hard, to be kind, to please people, to forgive abuse by her stepmother and sisters — but that she knew deep down that something wasn’t working?
So after the whole thing breaks down, after she makes her sisters dresses, and birds help her make a dress for herself, and her sisters tear it up anyway, and there’s just no way she’s going to get to the ball, and she’s reached the end of her rope with total humiliation and hopelessness, what does she do?
Cinderella cries. She can’t DO anything anymore.
She finally tunes in — to her inner knowing, her intuition, her emotions, her desires, her . . . magic? What if those deepest desires were so powerful that she recognized in herself the Divine Feminine? Who appeared to her as magic?
Her Fairy Godmother.
So, now I’m deconstructing everything. Even Prince Charming. All along, I’ve been thinking that Prince Charming is this man who saves Cinderella. But maybe I’ve been thinking too literally. What if he’s not a man, but just an archetype of the masculine, one part of Cinderella she yearns to marry with her feminine to find wholeness in herself?
What I’m trying to say is, what if those fairytales I’ve rejected as patriarchal poppycock are really subversive Heroine’s Journeys that have been showing us the way all along since we were girls?
What if Cinderella IS saving herself?
There’s so much here I want to question and discuss. What is beauty versus vanity? Why the back to rags after midnight? So many insights I want to explore.
All I have time to leave you with now, though, is this last thought: What if your beauty is actually you showing me your divinity? Try that on for size.
See if it fits you like it fits me.
